Mobile handsets have an inherently impoverished graphical user interface (GUI) with respect to desktop computers. Small screens and tiny keyboards are typical of mobile handsets that fit in your pocket. Recent so called smart phones have introduced the use of a touch screen in an attempt to simplify the user experience with his mobile handset. For instance, the touch interface of the iPhone® has revolutionized the mobile handset industry and brought whole new mobile user experiences.
In existing smart phones, application programs (AP) may be controlled using touch inputs. Different touch inputs may control the AP in different ways. For instance, a user touching an AP icon will cause a control of the desktop GUI that will launch the AP corresponding to the touched icon. Scrolling is one of the many controls offered to a user. FIGS. 2A-2B are illustrations of known scrolling on a GUI of a mobile device. A GUI 200 of a mobile application is illustrated in FIG. 2A. The GUI renders a first visible portion of an electronic document, comprising three snippets of news, namely 210, 211, and 212. The electronic document is scrollable in the vertical direction 220, to reveal a second hidden portion. Indeed, thanks to a user input in the direction 220 (illustrated in FIG. 2A with a finger moving a distance d), the second hidden portail can be displayed as shown in FIG. 2B. The snippets 210 disappears while the snippets 211 and 212 move the same distance d along the direction 220, revealing a fourth nippet 213, which was part so far of the hidden second portion. A scrolling indication 230 may be rendered while the user performs the scrolling input to give the user a visual feedback of his progress in the whole electronic document.
Existing smartphone interfaces, for instance social application GUIs, use today heavily the scrolling operation to show endless activity feeds in a quick way. This distracts the user from the content. Alternative solutions have been proposed to easy the rendering of information to the user. Such solutions may be found in applications like Flipboard™ which proposes a preprocessing of an electronic document to reformat it so that it can be rendered in a book the pages of which the user can flip.
Today there is still a need to an improved scrolling operation performed on an electronic document. There is a further need for a simplified simplified scrolling that does not distract the user from the content of the electronic document being scrolled.